Trivy (a very widely-used security scanner) was recently compromised. Anyone who installed the aquasecurity/trivy-action dependency by tag rather than by sha during a 3 hour period on March 19 was likely compromised. There is a Github security advisory at https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/security/advisories/GH...
6 separate people have tried to submit this to HN. All of the submissions are marked as [dead]. I am unsure whether this is a malicious action taken by the actors who compromised trivy or whether it's just the result of prior spam under github.com/aquasecurity, but regardless it is probably not ideal for security advisories to be auto-marked as [dead].
Please just email us (hn@ycombinator.com) when something like this happens.
Moderators didn't see these submissions or if we did, we didn't know why this project or incident was significant or important.
Now we've seen it, we've boosted the first submission of the incident onto the front page, and updated the URL and title to the most up-to-date/complete page about the incident.
The reason the submissions were being killed is that the GitHub account's address had been banned on HN due to previously being submitted by spam bots.
Oh that's clever. Use the spambot ring to promote the story so that the story gets marked dead because of that! Instead of hiding the news, use the botnet to promote it and use the system against itself.
I've noticed some HN posts get a higher-than-average number of replies from LLM bots. I've wondered if this has a downranking effect due to the upvote/comment ratio, and whether people might be using bots to do this intentionally. Alternatively it could just be that the bots "like" certain keywords more than others.
I did not see it but I was not affected since I had pinned the tag and used a cool down; practices whose value I reminded my coworkers of with this post.
6 separate people have tried to submit this to HN. All of the submissions are marked as [dead]. I am unsure whether this is a malicious action taken by the actors who compromised trivy or whether it's just the result of prior spam under github.com/aquasecurity, but regardless it is probably not ideal for security advisories to be auto-marked as [dead].
Moderators didn't see these submissions or if we did, we didn't know why this project or incident was significant or important.
Now we've seen it, we've boosted the first submission of the incident onto the front page, and updated the URL and title to the most up-to-date/complete page about the incident.
The reason the submissions were being killed is that the GitHub account's address had been banned on HN due to previously being submitted by spam bots.
Big security stories often get republished, one might say reviewed and filtered. For this story I see
opensourcemalware.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449498
stepsecurity.io - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47451081
arstechnica.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47464996
and 4 others.
( Make need to turn on "showdead"; to see it in the 2024 they have similar posts .. )
Or: write a short blog post about it, and post that, on your (different) domain.
It's certainly worked. Lots of people have seen this and now have a slightly worse opinion of HN moderation.
What practices?